They watched him gather up his briefcase and leave, the cowlick wagging at them like an admonitory finger as he went out the door.
When he was gone, Howie said he would make their travel arrangements. “I’ll charter the King Air I sometimes use. The pilots will know the closest landing strip. I’ll also arrange for a car. If it’s just the four of us, a sedan or a small SUV should do.”
“Leave a seat for me,” Yune said. “Just in case I can wiggle out of court.”
“Happy to.”
Alec Pelley said, “Someone needs to reach out to Mr. Bolton tonight, and tell him to expect visitors.”
Yune lifted a hand. “That much I can do.”
“Make him understand no one is after him for doing something illegal,” Howie said. “The last thing we want is for him to jackrabbit somewhere.”
“Call me after you talk to him,” Ralph said to Yune. “Even if it’s late. I want to know how he reacts.”
“So do I,” Jeannie said.
“You should tell him something else,” Holly said. “You should tell him to be careful. Because if I’m right about this, he’s the next in line.”
12
Full dark had come when Ralph and the others stepped out of Howie Gold’s building. Howie himself was still upstairs, making arrangements, and his investigator was with him. Ralph wondered what they would talk about with everyone else gone.
“Ms. Gibney, where are you staying?” Jeannie asked.
“The Flint Luxury Motel. I reserved a room.”
“Oh no, you can’t,” Jeannie said. “The only luxury there is on the sign out front. The place is a pit.”
Holly looked disconcerted. “Well, there must be a Holiday Inn—”
“Stay with us,” Ralph said, beating Jeannie to it and hoping it would earn him some points later on. God knew he could use them.
Holly hesitated. She didn’t do well in the houses of other people. She didn’t do well even in the one where she had grown up, when on her quarterly duty visits to her mother. She knew that in the home of these strangers she would lie awake long and wake early, hearing every unfamiliar creak of the walls and the floors, listening to the murmured voices of the Andersons and wondering if they were talking about her . . . which they almost certainly would be. Hoping that if she had to get up in the night to spend a penny, they wouldn’t hear her. She needed her sleep. The meeting had been stressful enough, and the steady pushback of Detective Anderson’s disbelief had been understandable but exhausting.
But, as Bill Hodges would have said. But.
Anderson’s disbelief was the but. It was the reason she had to accept the invitation, and she did.
“Thank you, that’s very kind, but I have to run an errand first. It won’t take long. Give me your address, and my iPad will take me right to you.”
“Is it anything I can help you with?” Ralph asked. “I’d be happy to—”
“No. Really. I’ll be fine.” She shook hands with Yune. “Come with us if you can, Lieutenant Sablo. I’m sure you want to.”
He smiled. “I do, believe me, but it’s like that poem says—I have promises to keep.”
Marcy Maitland was standing by herself, holding her purse against her stomach and looking shell-shocked. Jeannie went to her without hesitation. Ralph watched with interest as Marcy initially drew back, as if in alarm, then allowed herself to be hugged. After a moment she even put her head on Jeannie Anderson’s shoulder and hugged back. She looked like a tired child. When the two women drew apart, both of them were crying.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Jeannie said.
“Thank you.”
“If there’s anything I can do for you or your girls, anything at all—”
“You can’t, but he can.” She turned her attention to Ralph, and although her eyes were still wet with tears, they were cold. Assessing. “This outsider, I want you to find him. Don’t let him get away just because you don’t believe in him. Can you do that?”
“I don’t know,” Ralph said, “but I’ll try.”
Marcy said no more, only took Yune Sablo’s offered arm and let him lead her to her car.
13
Half a block down, parked in front of the long-abandoned Woolworth’s, Jack sat in his truck, sipping from a flask and watching the group on the sidewalk. The only one he couldn’t identify was a slender woman in the kind of suit a businesswoman might wear on a trip. Her hair was short, the graying bangs a little ragged, as if she had cut them herself. The case slung over her shoulder looked big enough to hold a shortwave radio. This woman watched as Sablo, the taco-bender state cop, squired Mrs. Maitland away. The stranger then walked to her car, which was too nondescript to be anything but an airport rental. Hoskins thought briefly of following her, but decided to stick with the Andersons. It had been Ralph who brought him here, after all, and wasn’t there some saying about going home with the girl you took to the dance?
Besides, Anderson bore watching. Hoskins had never liked him, and since that snotty two-word evaluation a year ago (No opinion, he’d written . . . as if his shit didn’t stink), Jack had detested him. He had been delighted when Anderson tripped over his dick with the Maitland arrest, and it didn’t surprise him to discover the self-righteous sonofabitch was now meddling in things better left alone. A closed case, for instance.
Jack touched the back of his neck, winced, then started his truck. He supposed he could go home after he saw the Andersons inside, but he thought maybe he’d just park up the street and keep an eye on their house. See what happened. He had a Gatorade bottle he could piss in, and he might even be able to sleep a little, if the steady hot throb from the back of his neck would allow that. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d slept in this truck; he’d done it on several occasions since the day the old ball and chain had walked out.
Jack wasn’t sure what came next, but he had a clear fix on the basic task: to stop the meddling. The meddling in exactly what he didn’t know, only that it had something to do with the Peterson boy. And the barn in Canning Township. That was enough for now, and—sunburn aside, possible skin cancer aside—he was getting interested.
He felt that when the time came for the next step, he would be told.
14
With the help of her navigation app, Holly made a quick and easy drive to the Flint City Walmart. She loved Walmarts, the size of them, the anonymity of them. Shoppers didn’t seem to look at other shoppers as they did in other stores; it was as if they were all in their own private capsules, buying clothes or video games or toilet paper in bulk. It wasn’t even necessary to speak to a cashier, if you used the self-checkout. Which Holly always did. Her shopping was quick, because she knew exactly what she wanted. She went first to OFFICE SUPPLIES, then to MENS AND BOYS WEAR, finally to AUTOMOTIVE. She took her basket to the self-checkout and tucked the receipt into her wallet. These were business expenses, for which she expected to be reimbursed. If she lived, that was. She had an idea (one of Holly’s famous intuitions, she heard Bill Hodges saying) that was more likely to happen if Ralph Anderson—so like Bill in some ways, so very different from him in others—could get past the divide in his mind.
She returned to her car and drove to the Anderson house. But before leaving the parking lot, she said a brief prayer. For all of them.
15
Ralph’s cell phone rang just as he and Jeannie were entering the kitchen. It was Yune. He had gotten the Marysville number of Lovie Bolton from John Zellman, the owner of Gentlemen, Please, and had reached Claude with no trouble.
“What did you tell him?” Ralph asked.